Semblance: Of Return [CD]

A Semblance: Of Return is the new album from South African drummer, composer, and bandleader Asher Gamedze, available on Northern Spy Records as a limited "Emulsive Return" clear smoke 12" LP, and digipak CD.Gamedze gathers a close ensemble of longtime collaborators to explore what he calls "practices of assembly" - ways of making sound, and imagining new and old modes of freedom. Based in the independent music scenes of Cape Town and rooted in Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness, Of Return extends the political and musical commitments that have defined Gamedze's work from Dialectic Soul (On The Corner, 2020), to Turbulence and Pulse (International Anthem, 2022) and Constitution (International Anthem, 2024) while opening a newly collective chapter in his practice, this time on Northern Spy.The band on the album - Ru Slayen (percussion), Nobuhle Ashanti (keys & synth), Zwide Ndwandwe (bass), and Keegan Steenkamp (trumpet), with Gamedze on drums - formed as a social unit: a group for whom music is part of a broader shared life, full of playing, thinking, laughing, and struggling. That ethos animates the music. Across the album's two sides, Of Return serves as a gathering place: a living room, a rehearsal, a shady club, a study group, a home. The music moves with a grounded, searching energy, shifting between group vocals, groove-heavy ensemble passages, and moments of stark melodic clarity. The grooves are earthy and lived-in; the improvisations feel like conversations; the lyric fragments echo the project's probing around notions of return as integral to any forward, future-oriented motion.Of Return enacts both return and departure, or more precisely, extension/elaboration. This it does through a rootedness in the traditions and politics of the Cape underground, and opening a sonic invitation to dream, to struggle together, and, fundamentally, to assemble.